Science, design and cartography merges to become MAPPA ANIMALIA, a visual project of mine that reimagines the evolutionary relationships of animals as detailed map-like landscapes.

Instead of political borders or geographical territories, these maps are structured around taxonomy/ phylogenetic trees, translating the scientific classification of species into navigable visual worlds.

Subfamilies, tribes and genera replace countries, states and regions within these imagined territories, allowing viewers to explore the animal kingdom through a format traditionally used to understand geography.

So far Mappa Animalia consists of 14 different illustrations, each dedicated to different family trees.

This post shows Cervidae - Land of Deer, which illustrates every single species of deer that ever existed (shown as cities on the map), arranged by borders into the different subfamilies, tribes and genera that the family Cervidae splits into.

Each illustration is accompanied by an info sheet that explains in detail how to navigate this map as well as some text about the role deer play in the ecosystem. It also has all the species indexed alphabetically and shows where on the map to find them each of them (for example the moose is located in grit C2). From there you can easily backtrack to identify what genus, tribe and subfamily a particular species belong to.

Other info in also included like conservation status of the individual species, size difference between some of the more distinct types of deer and how long the subfamilies have been around for.

I've spend roughly 10 years slowly perfecting this concept and only very recently arrived at something | feel really happy with and I'm interested in know what you guys think :)

Happy exploring!

A navigable map of the entire deer family (Cervidae), based on biology rather than geography.